Echo Beyond the Code

he child’s feet made no sound against the broken stones as it drifted closer, head tilting in a way no living creature should. Guts didn’t flinch. He simply adjusted his stance, Dragonslayer raised a hair’s breadth off the ground, ready to strike.

The rosary of bones rattled again, and the child smiled — a wet, splitting grin that tore too wide across its face. From the mist behind it came more figures, slipping free like maggots from a carcass: dozens of them, men, women, children, all with the same blank, broken eyes. Each wore a rosary. Each staggered forward in silent worship, as if drawn to him by a thread he could not see.

The Brand on Guts’ neck howled, hot blood seeping down his collar. He gritted his teeth.
“Come, then,” he muttered under his breath, voice low and feral.
The Dragonslayer sang as it swung.
The child’s head snapped back in a spray of black mist, and the sword’s momentum carved through the throng behind it. Bodies burst apart not like flesh and bone but like smoke clinging desperately to form. Yet for every one he felled, two more surged forward, empty hands clawing, reaching for the warmth of his blood, the anchor of his soul.

As he fought, he realized the truth: they were not attacking.
They were begging.
A thousand dead prayers pressed against him, and Guts, as always, had only one answer to give.

The sun never rose. Only a dim, sickly light seeped across the wasteland, coloring the world in bruised shades of gray. Guts trudged onward, his armor clanking with each step, weighed down not just by the steel but by the unseen hands of everything he had killed — everything he had lost. In the corner of his vision, the shadows moved when they should not. Shapes curled at the edges of the dead trees, watching him without eyes.

At the crest of a crumbling ridge, he stopped. Below, nestled between broken hills, a village — or what remained of one. Roofs collapsed under their own rot, fences swallowed by creeping fog. No fires burned. No dogs barked. Only the stillness of a grave. Guts narrowed his eyes. He knew this smell too well. Not death. Something worse. Something wrong. The kind of wrong that stirred the Brand on his neck into a low, throbbing scream.

He descended, Dragonslayer dragging a furrow behind him. With every step, the mist thickened, swallowing the world until only the ruined shapes of buildings flanked him. Then — a sound. A brittle, broken laugh, so soft it might have been mistaken for the wind. Guts turned. Out from the mist stumbled a figure: a child, no more than ten, barefoot and filthy, eyes empty like glass dolls. Around the child’s neck, a rosary of bones clattered softly. Guts said nothing. He knew better than to speak to the dead.

The battlefield stank of blood and iron. Beneath a sky choked with smoke, the corpses of men and beasts tangled together, stripped of armor, stripped of dignity. Guts stood alone among them, the Dragonslayer heavy against his shoulder, his breath slow and ragged. Each gust of wind rattled broken spears and banners alike, a hollow whisper against the endless silence of the dead.

He moved forward, boots sinking into the wet earth, toward the last standing figure — a knight, face obscured by a cracked helmet, trembling under the weight of his own sword. No words were exchanged. No cries for mercy. In this world, mercy was a forgotten language, and Guts had long since lost the tongue to speak it. With a single step, he closed the distance, blade cleaving through steel and bone as though cutting through mist. The knight fell without a sound, his body folding into the dirt like a marionette with its strings snapped.

For a moment, Guts stood still, the weight of another life added to the burden he carried. The brand on his neck pulsed, a deep, searing throb that reminded him he was never alone — that the things lurking just beyond the veil of the living waited, hungered, for him. He tightened his grip on the Dragonslayer, the sword that had become his only companion, and pressed onward into the blackened horizon where neither salvation nor rest awaited — only war without end.